“Gen. James L. Jones, who stepped down recently as President Obama’s national security adviser, often told visitors that if he had to pick one foreign policy issue to tackle, it would be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because its resolution would help with all the others.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversaw American war efforts in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, told Congress this year that the lack of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict created a hostile environment for the United States in the region. ”

How many times do Americans have to hear this?

How many leaders, analyst, historians keep repeating this?

Former head of the CIA Bin Laden unit Micheal Scheuer, Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Queen Noor, Former President Jimmy Carter, recently Former President Bill Clinton, 9/11 commission

The 19 men who hijacked the planes, obviously. They were the ones who did the killing, and no (alleged) provocations by Israel or the US mitigate their guilt.

Now a parallel question for you. Who is more to blame for the 1000+ people killed in Gaza in Cast Lead? Israel, who did the killing, or the people of Gaza who (allegedly) “provoked” the Israeli attack?

Perhaps Yonile can explain what the five Israelis were doing on the other side of the river taking videos of the burning WTC and laughing, according to a witness who called the police who later arrested the five. The March 15, 2002, Forward identified them by name as Mossad agents and the moving company they were working for as a Mossad front, a story which somehow eluded the mainstream press.

What was curious Yonile, was that they were on the spot with their camera BEFORE it became known that the attack was not an accident but a “terrorist” attack. Kept for two months in a New Jersey jail and freed thanks to the efforts of Michael Mukasey (now why does that name sound familiar?) when back in Israel they were asked on TV what they were doing taking pictures of the WTC. “We were there to document it,” one of them said. Indeed. Now, what we may ask were they doing in New Jersey and why did they need a truck and why does the American public not know about this and about the four other instances in which phony Israeli movers have been arrested by local police including Illinois, Maryland and New Mexico?

Face it, friends, this country is crawling with Israeli agents not to mention those who stand upright and draw their paychecks in Washington?

Oh yes, I should mention that two hours before the attack, the Israeli Odigo messaging service received a call that the attack would take place. This was reported in Ha’aretz and amazingly, in the Washington Post. There was no followup and none of the above was mentioned in the 9-11 commission cover-up,

A dear friend from Afghanistan who was studying here at Ohio University on a Fulbright a couple years after 9/11. Said that the government of Afghanistan was demanding verified evidence linking OBL to 9/11 and the Bush administration did not or could not provide them with that verifiable evidence.

I don’t doubt that’s true for the US and many other countries, and it’s precisely why I suspect there may be, on any given day, agents hanging around parking lots etc with cameras, ready to film something that never does happen. I mean: how many leads on potential attacks do these guys deal with during an average work week or month? So when it does actually happen, they cheer about having it right once and not having waited around in vain, as must be the case most of the time.

Yonira who is more to blame for the bombing and destruction of the USS Liberty the death of 34 U.S. crew and 170 injured? The 19 men or Israel?

My point was about U.S. foreign policy and our unbridled support of Israel no matter what they do. And how many experts, leaders, historians etc have been repeating that they hate us for our foreign policy not because of our freedoms.

Flynt Leverett nails it in one of his latest interviewslink to yale.edu
From 1992 to 2003, Mr. Leverett served as Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and as a CIA Senior Analyst. Mr. Leverett’s articles and Op Eds on Iran, other Middle East issues, and global energy affairs have been published in numerous media outlets. We talk with Mr. Leverett about American grand strategy in the Middle East and his judgment that we are on the road to failure in this critical region.

With Clinton coming out recently sayinglink to google.com
“”It will take about half the impetus in the whole world — not just the region, the whole world — for terror away,” he told an audience of Egyptian businessmen from the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt. “It would have more impact by far than anything else that could be done.”

The founding of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians more than six decade ago has long been a rallying cry among Arabs and Muslims in the region and more recently is a regular recruiting tool for organizations like al-Qaida.

Clinton presided over the breakthrough Oslo Accords in 1993 that led to direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians over the principle of land for peace as well as a last ditch effort to negotiate a final agreement in 2000 before violence derailed negotiations.

He said both sides knew the outlines of any final agreement and said it was similar to the one he hammered out with Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak in 2000.”

Clinton is publicly lining up with Former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden’s unit Micheal Shuerer who has been saying this for years now. He has been on C-span’s Washington Journal repeating “they don’t hate us for our freedoms, they hate us for our foreign policy”

Scheuer “What Bin Laden basically said is America is fighting a war that does not exist. We’re fighting because our leaders tell us that the Muslims hate freedom , and hate liberty, and hate women in the work place, and that’s got nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with what we do in the Islamic world. What our policies are and what our impact is there. That is what Bin Laden was referring to. That is what my book says”

Micheal Scheuerlink to antiwar.com
“AIPAC is a perfectly legal organization, and the wealth of its members is channeled into reliable campaign contributions for any candidate from either party who will put Israel’s interests above America’s. From McCain to Obama, from Pelosi to Giuliani, from Hillary Clinton to Vice President Cheney, AIPAC pumps money to any and every American politician who is willing to adopt an Israel-first policy.”

Former head of the Cia’s Bin Laden unit Micheal Scheuer on Tavis Smiley’s programlink to pbs.org

What Scheuer keeps repeating lines up with former Cia analyst Ray McGovern has said about the conflict
Helping Israel Die

Former CIA analyst Kathleen and Bill Christion have been saying very similar thingslink to counterpunch.org
“Nobody Should Preach to Us Ethics, Nobody!”
Israel, a Light unto Nations?

By Kathleen Christison
Former CIA political analyst

In the never-ending propaganda show designed to depict Israel as a moral nation victimized by immoral terrorists and anti-Semites, CNN recently ran a film clip of the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin declaiming, as only he could, “Nobody should preach to us ethics, nobody!”

So many others have been saying very similar things for years. Former President Jimmy Carter, Queen Noor, Edward Said, Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein and now J Street, Mondoweiss . The list goes on and on.

How many times do we have to hear the same thing?

Now these are the kinds of links that I provided over at FDL on issues. Always supplying others with anything that I had read from other sources about the topic they were on.

From the NYT article – “Let’s assume that you’ve resolved the conflict or that Israel has disappeared or that Israel and the United States are now enemies. Will the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq suddenly start making love? Will the Sunis, Shiites and Christians in Lebanon suddenly start making love? Will the Sunnis, Shiites and Christians in Lebanon get together? Will it end the Oppression of Christians in Egypt? Will it raise the status of woman or put an end to the use of violence as a politcal weapon in the Muslim world?”

Probably not, but U.S. and other western governments have never been seriously concerned about these problems. So long as the oil keeps flowing westward, they couldn’t care less how Arabs/Muslims treat one another?. Besides, it’s Empire & its minions who are the chief users of violence as a political weapon in the Muslim world.

It’s much more than just not caring about seeing them kill each other, the US has been instrumental in keeping the conflict going between the Sunni and the Shia all over the world. Something to do with the old colonialist concept of divide and rule. Lebanon is next up at the bat via the UN special tribunal on the Hariri assassination.

As to what shakes in Iraq, from Ahmed Habib, Electronic Intifada, the Deadly Lie of Democracy in Iraq:
“… In 1963, the CIA-backed coup that deposed the populist, left-leaning government of Brigadier General Abdul Karim Qassim, and eventually brought Saddam’s Baath party to power, seems like it just happened yesterday. During the bloody hijack, lists of progressive activists were provided to Baathist henchmen by the US to be murdered in campuses and other public spaces. One of the men toting a gun, terrorizing the University of Baghdad, was none other than the esteemed Dr. Ayad Allawi himself, one of the main contestants in the recent Iraqi elections. He is the leader of the Iraqi National Movement (al-Iraqiya), the political party which won the greatest number of seats.

His rival, Nouri al-Maliki, is secretary general of the Islamic Dawa (Preaching) Party, which was established by a collection of clerics in the 1960s to build an Islamic state in Iraq. Although it was not secular like its Baathist counterpart, it also saw socialism as its main enemy. From its inception, al-Maliki’s party enjoyed an incestuous relationship with the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and lived under its protection throughout the entirety of Saddam’s regime. Both the party’s history and sectarian outlook make it a perfect complement to the complete destruction of Iraq, and thus has enjoyed great success in occupied Iraq. Currently, the Dawa Party operates under the guise of the State of Law Coalition which received the second greatest number of seats in the 2010 elections.

Both parties are self-avowed friends of the US and employ a strategy of completely burning Iraq so they can rebuild it according to their own perverted, US-endorsed visions of democracy. While Allawi prefers a nationalist-leaning, neoliberal death for the country, al-Maliki intends to bury Baghdad and other cities under the rubble of sectarian strife. In both cases, tyranny, corruption and mass murder are required elements to complete the task. To that end, the US is ecstatic, and is satisfied with playing a role of a divisive dictator from a distance.link to electronicintifada.net

Bronner is just being a tribalist, and what he probably imagines is a good dad. He wouldn’t want the readers of the NYT to think the IDF is a bunch of no good killer thugs – not when his own offspring is an enlisted member.

According to the NYT everything he writes is “examined microscopically for signs of bias.”. How about some basic fact checking instead?

In March this year, reporting on the first death caused by a Gaza rocket in 14 months (since the end of the Gaza Massacre), the BBC referred to a UN statistic that during the same time period 88 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed by the IDF. A few weeks later, reporting on Hamas’ attempts to curb the the firing of rockets, they again referred to the UN statistic, though in the intervening weeks IDF violence had claimed more Palestinian lives, so they had to resort to the more imprecise formulation:

Over roughly the same period, about 90 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in a mixture of Israeli military operations and border clashes, according to the UN.

If the BBC can do it occasionally (report accurately on deaths) why can’t the New York Times? FFS I’m an internet nobody and I can pull up this information in just a few minutes. In the link above the NYT boasts Bronner is “the top correspondent for America’s most influential newspaper”. I suppose influential is not the same as honest.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights issue weekly reports on Israeli human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Their archives extend back as far as 2001. A look at even just the last 4 weeks will tell you violence continues on a massive scale. A military occupation is by definition violent.

One of the most heinous crimes being committed (currently) by the IDF is shooting children in Gaza. Defence for Children International (DCI) reported in October about the shooting of children in or near the buffer zone while they collected gravel to use as building material. They report 10 shootings since May, 6 of them beyond the buffer zone. The end of that article mentions the young female “spotters” who are stationed in an IDF operations room far away from Gaza: Playstation-style, they sit all day in front of screens connected to cameras on the Gaza wall, operating their machine guns via joystick. Jonathon Cook wrote a must-read article for The National in July “Israel paves the way for killing by remote control“. Cook builds on previous Haaretz reports by Anselm Pfeffer that appeared in Haaretz on the female “spotters”, reporting that dozens of “terrorists” had been killed by the young women. The first Haaretz article quotes twenty year old Bar Keren: “It’s very alluring to be the one to do this. But not everyone wants this job. It’s no simple matter to take up a joystick like that of a Sony PlayStation and kill, but ultimately it’s for defense.”

Cook writes about the utility of the occupation, how it offers Israeli death industries (“military contractors”) a captive population on which to test their weapon systems. Jeff Halper of ICAHD talks about what he calls The Global Pacification Industry, and how, when an Israeli military contractor says their equipment is “battlefield tested”, they actually mean “Battlefield Tested on Palestinians”.

Now let us return to Bronner who is off with the fairies: “It is worth noting that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been largely drained of deadly violence in the past few years.”

Is it any wonder traditional media is failing when they serve up tripe like that?

After Cast Lead, the number of killings dropped, and the truth is that militarily, Israel won. The combination of wall, siege and police state, with cooperation of PA is working. Assassination etc. by Israeli forces are less frequent.

This does not abolish hysteria in Israel, and firm conviction that inhumane measures that work have to be maintained forever (and will work forever). How many Messenian wars did Sparta won? A lot. And lost only one. Helots can be kept down for a long time.

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